There are only 19 days to go until November 5. I believe that Kamala Harris will win, but I was also sure Hillary Clinton would win in 2016.
Both Harris and Trump have been holding rallies and giving interviews. She speaks in complete sentences and discusses her policies in a coherent fashion. He can’t complete a sentence, mispronounces words, rambles nonsensically, and has no understanding of his own policies. And, of course, he is a pathological liar.
Harris is a former prosecutor who is committed to the rule of law. Trump is a convicted felon out on bail, with multiple indictments hanging over his head. How can the race be close?
One positive development is that Trump’s dementia and his violent rhetoric and threats are getting more attention in the media. He and his advisers may well live to regret driving Joe Biden out of the race.
I feel as if my life is on hold until I know who will win this election. If Harris wins, my life will continue on its current track. If Trump wins, everything will change–and not in a good way. In addition, the chaos we have all lived through in the past 9 years will continue and most likely get much worse. That’s where things stand right now, as I see it.
State of the Race
In the latest national polls, Harris leads by a few points.
In the presidential contest, Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by five points among likely voters, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. The race gets closer, however, among registered voters nationally. Here, three points separate the two candidates.
Harris (52%) leads Trump (47%) among likely voters nationally, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. Earlier this month, two points separated Harris (50%) and Trump (48%) among likely voters.
The contest is tighter among registered voters. Among the general electorate, Harris receives 51% to 48% for Trump. In early October, the same margin separated Harris (50%) and Trump (47%) among the broader electorate.
Trump (54%) leads Harris (44%) among independents who are likely to vote, widening the 4-point edge Trump (50%) had against Harris (46%) previously.
Trump (53%) leads Harris (47%) among men who are likely to vote while Harris (57%) has the advantage over Trump (42%) among women.
While members of Gen X divide (51% for Harris to 48% for Trump), Harris has majority support among GenZ/Millennials (53%) and among Baby Boomers/the Silent-Greatest Generations (55%).
While the gap between the two remained steady compared with a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, the new poll, which closed on Sunday, gave signs that voters – particularly Democrats – might be more enthused about this year’s election than they were ahead of the November 2020 presidential election when Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump.
Some 78% of registered voters in the three-day poll – including 86% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans – said they were “completely certain” they would cast a ballot in the presidential election. The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74% in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
The poll had a margin of error of around 4 percentage points.
A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
The swing state is one of the most closely watched this election, with former President Donald Trump trying to reclaim it after losing there to President Joe Biden by a small margin four years ago, leading Trump and his allies to unsuccessfully push to overturn his defeat.
Those efforts have loomed large this year as new changes to how the state conducts elections have been approved by Republican members of the State Election Board, leading Democrats and others to mount legal challenges, many of which have yet to be resolved even as Election Day nears.
Despite the massive turnout on Tuesday, the process appeared to go smoother this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke with CNN.
“Last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the door. They only had like, maybe like three people working,” said Corine Canada. “So people honestly just started leaving because it was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here (and) wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”
Dementia Don
Yesterday Trump appeared at the Economic Club of Chicago and gave a disastrous interview. He mostly talked about his plan to put high tariffs on imports, and continued to claim that these tariffs would be paid by foreign countries and not by Americans paying higher prices. Other news from the interview: he would not commit to allowing a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
Donald Trump continued his pre-election economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.
Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.
Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.
Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased….
The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.
When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs.
A bit more:
Micklethwait tried to explain the actual impact. “Three-trillion worth of imports and you will add tariffs to every single one of them, and push up the cost for all of these people to buy foreign goods,” he said. “That is just simple mathematics.”
Trump countered that he was “always good at mathematics,” and that high tariffs — and thus costs — would force companies to move production into the United States.
Anxiety, by Edvard Munch
“That will take many, many, many years,” Micklethwait said, to which Trump replied that high enough penalties would make the move immediate as if companies could simply wand wave production plants, orchards, wineries, factories, and the like into existence.
The former president also insisted that his tariff proposal would not result in the loss of jobs that are dependent on trade, because companies that moved to the U.S. would not be subject to the tax. “All you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said…..
Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.
When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upwards of $7 trillion, the former president fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.
“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.
“You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” he added.
There’s more at the link. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I clicked on the link at Memeorandum.
Former president Donald Trump is campaigning on the most significant increase in tariffs in close to a century, preparing an attack on the international trade order that would likely raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world.
Trump’s trade plans, a staple of his stump speeches, have fluctuated, but he consistently calls for steep duties to discourage imports and promote domestic production. The former president has floated “automatic” tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on every U.S. trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances.
These proposals would go far beyond the disruptive trade wars of his first term even if they are only partially implemented. They would wrench the nation out of the system of global interdependence that arose in recent decades, making the U.S. economy much more isolated and autonomous, like it was in the late 19th century. (Trump last week falsely claimed that the United States was never richer than in the 1890s, when it had high trade barriers.)
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favorite,” Trump said in Chicago on Tuesday. “I’m a believer in tariffs.”
The consequences would be far-reaching: Americans would be hit by higher prices for grocery staples from abroad, such as fruit, vegetables and coffee. Domestic firms dependent on imports would need to either figure out new supply chains or raise costs for consumers. U.S. manufacturers would almost certainly see sharp declines in orders from abroad as foreign nations impose retaliatory tariffs.
“We are talking about a plan of historic significance: It would be enormous, and the blowback would be even more enormous,” said Douglas A. Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College who authored a 2017 book on the history of U.S. trade policy. “This would stand way off the charts.”
Companies and governments around the world have begun preparing contingency plans for the potential Trump tariffs. Diplomats and business leaders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and even Canada have in recent weeks asked their U.S. counterparts about Trump’s intentions and authorities, according to interviews with several domestic and international economic advisers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private planning.
While some business leaders and congressional Republicans remain optimistic that the former president is engaged in election-year posturing, Trump has repeatedly insisted that tariffs represent an unmitigated positive for the U.S. economy, recently calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” Tariffs have been a constant bedrock of his economic agenda since he first ran in 2016, along with lower taxes, increased energy production and deregulation.
You should watch the interview Trump did yesterday at the Economic Club of Chicago. You might think you’ve got a pretty good idea of the big guy’s solipsism, his buffoonish overconfidence, his utter inability to engage on matters of policy. Watch a few answers, and you’ll be forced to conclude: It’s way worse than you thought.
Victor Wang, Emotional tension and psychological drama
Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait began by asking Trump simple questions, like how he plans to pay for the $7 trillion hole his proposals would blow in the federal deficit. Trump responded with his ordinary magical thinking about making that sum back through a combination of growth and tariffs. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” he said. “It’s my favorite word . . . the most beautiful word.”
Micklethwait asked how Trump planned to follow through on his promises of trimming the fat of wasteful spending. Trump responded with a lengthy story about him personally spending months negotiating with Boeing over a contract for new planes to serve as Air Force One, which ultimately saved the government more than a billion dollars. A cool story—until you remember the federal government spends an average of nearly $17 billion a day.
It takes a certain amount of ego and delusion to run for president. Trump has those characteristics in excess. But what stood out at the talk yesterday was the degree to which these are now the only elements undergirding his vision. Gone is the talk about surrounding himself with the best people. Dropped is the pretense that his answers are coherent. (Trump has started referring to his meandering logorrhea as “the weave.”) The pitch instead is that some sort of mad genius remains within him: Trust me, I’m the deals guy! I’ll get the best deals!
But there’s a lot more to guiding the economy than dealmaking, and even the most capable, hard-nosed, mano-a-mano negotiating with individual vendors can only take you so far.
There’s more about the interview at the link. There’s no paywall.
Donald Trump on Tuesday dodged the question of whether he will allow for a peaceful certification of election results if Kamala Harris defeats him in three weeks.
During an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait asked Trump if he would commit “to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power,” especially in light of Jan. 6, 2021, which the journalist called “unruly and violent.”
Trump didn’t answer the question. Instead, he rejected the premise and blamed Micklethwait as “a man that has not been a big Trump fan over the years.” He also falsely claimed that he allowed for a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated him.
“Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared to Venezuela, but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” Micklethwait insisted.
The audience booed and Trump thanked them. The former president then admitted that people were angry when they arrived in Washington to protest the results that January—but according to him, they were perfectly behaved.
“It was love and peace, and some people went to the Capitol,” Trump said. “And a lot of strange things happened there, a lot of strange things, with people being waved into the Capitol by police.”
For perhaps the first time, Trump downplayed his crowd size.
He added that he left the White House the morning he was supposed to and that only a fraction of the protestors were among those who breached and defaced the Capitol.
“Not one of those people had a gun, nobody was killed, except for Ashli Babbitt,” he said.
MAGA-friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen dropped an interesting nugget right as Squawk Box went to commercial break on Tuesday.
“Well, Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” Kernen said.
Not only did Trump once love going on CNBC, but Kernen’s revelation comes on the heels of Trump declining or canceling a number of other high-profile opportunities to make a pitch to voters on mainstream TV. Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris a second time, which would’ve aired on CNN. Trump then refused CNN’s offer to host a town hall. And Trump of course also recently backed out of a 60 Minutes interview.
Still Tension, Wassily Kandinsky
The explanation for all this is not that Trump has suddenly become camera shy. It’s that his campaign undoubtedly realizes his rapidly degrading condition doesn’t play well with audiences beyond the MAGA cult. As a result, they’re retreating to the safer terrain of nonstop rallies and fawning Fox hits….
The reason Trump’s campaign isn’t keen to get him in front of swing voters on mainstream platforms was on stark display Tuesday when Trump did a rare event that wasn’t a festival of sycophancy.
By any objective standard, Trump’s Economic Club of Chicago interview was a disaster. He came out of the gates with an asinine proposal for 2,000 percent tariffs on imported cars, then was quickly reduced to insulting the moderator, Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, when Micklethwait rightly pointed out that his his economic proposals are an inflationary disaster. (Watch below.)
By the end of the event, Trump had veered into making an impassioned defense of the big lie and his coup attempt, bragging about his crowd size on January 6 and absurdly claiming the events of that day were just “love and peace.” (Watch below.)
OAKS, Pa. — The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.
And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd whether “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.
For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.
He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night….
As Trump stood onstage in his oversize suit and bright red tie, swaying back and forth, it was almost as if he were taking a trip back to decades past. Trump’s decision to cut short the question-and-answer portion of the town hall and instead have the crowd stay to listen to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, given that the election was only 22 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and questioned his mental acuity.
Some in the crowd began to leave. Some looked around, wondering whether he was done speaking for the night and how much longer the dance — or sway — session would last. Many stayed holding their cameras and watched as Trump took in the music, at times looking over at a screen beside him that showed videos of James Brown singing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’sWorld” and Sinéad O’Connor performing “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
The Anxiety Monster, by Jeremy Campbell
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
Angry, frustrated, confused, unable to focus. And now, he retreats to his happy place in a time of stress. Put it all together and ask yourself if that’s someone you’d trust to take care of your kids in a house with a working stove.
With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.
A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.
“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”
And on Tuesday, he once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when pressed by an interviewer at an economic forum in Chicago.
With early voting underway in key battlegrounds, the race for the White House is moving toward Election Day in an extraordinary and sobering fashion. Mr. Trump has long flirted with, if not openly endorsed, anti-democratic tendencies with his continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, embrace of conspiracy theories of large-scale voter fraud and accusations that the justice system is being weaponized against him. He has praised leaders including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for being authoritarian strongmen.
But never before has a presidential nominee — let alone a former president — openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy. As he escalates his threats of political retribution, Mr. Trump is offering voters the choice of a very different, and far less democratic, form of American government.
“There is not a case in American history where a presidential candidate has run for office on a promise that they would exact retribution against anyone they perceive as not supporting them in the campaign,” said Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel under Barack Obama who leads the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “It’s so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it’s hard to articulate how insane it is.”
Harris and Waltz are also calling attention to Trump’s cognitive issues and threats. They have three weeks left to educate the public an get legacy media to focus on Trump’s age and obvious dementia.
Take care everyone and keep hope alive, as Jesse Jackson used to say.
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You know it’s just another week in Drumpfistan when I’ve got this old song by the Temptations stuck in my head.
Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation Ball Of Confusion that’s what the world is today (yeah, yeah) The sale of pills is at an all time high young folks walkin’ ’round with their heads in the sky Cities aflame in the summer time, and oh the beat goes on Eve of destruction, tax deduction, City inspectors, bill collectors, Evolution, revolution,…
“In light of this last election, I’m concerned about us as women and how we think,” she said at the event. “What is going on in our heads where we let that happen, you know?”
In the 2016 election, 54 percent of women voted for Clinton, though that figure was sharply divided by race.
“When the most qualified person running was a woman, and look what we did instead, I mean that says something about where we are,” Obama said, referencing President Trump‘s victory in the 2016 election. “That’s what we have to explore, because if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men … if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to … what, then we have to have those conversations with ourselves as women.”
Obama encouraged women to have high aspirations, but went on to add that she wished “girls could fail as bad as men do and still be OK.”
“Watching men fail up is frustrating. It is frustrating watching men blow it, and win,” she later added while discussing standards for women.
Obama also touched on the importance of education for women and encouraging young girls to speak their minds.
The United State of Women describes itself on its website as a “national organization for any woman who sees that we need a different America for all women to survive and thrive.”
Nothing has made me more sharply aware of my white womaness than this last damned presidential race. Black women were not fooled and they worked hard to get Clinton elected down here in Louisiana. Many white woman simply will not Surrender the Ivory Pedestal. Figuring this out and correcting it is something only white women can do with each other. Making sure that we do not disenfranchise the women of color around us is our challenge.
Republicans in D.C. are panicking over Tuesday’s West Virginia Senate primary.
The problem: Don Blankenship, a coal baron who’s spent time in prison, is running a demagogic campaign in which he’s repeatedly invoked the Chinese heritage of Mitch McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
He’s also taken to calling McConnell “cocaine Mitch” in his ads — which, according to Politico, “is in reference to a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by McConnell’s in-laws; however, he always found the products from https://urinedrugtesthq.com/whizzinator-review/ to pass his drug tests in one day.”
Blankenship is outspending his opponents on TV and has a ton of his own money to play with. He’s aired one ad that refers to “China people,” which you can watch here (or not).
And yet … he’s gaining in the polls and may win on Tuesday.
Blankenship is running against Rep. Evan Jenkins and Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to be the Republican nominee to challenge Manchin in the fall. Their primary race is Tuesday, May 8. His credentials, and campaign tactics, have Republicans on edge about the prospect of him potentially becoming the party’s nominee.
Blankenship is a former coal baron who ran a company, Massey Energy, found to be violating federal safety regulations when a 2010 mining explosion killed 29 people, marking the worst coal disaster in 40 years. Blankenship stepped down after the incident but years later was indicted on conspiring to willfully violate federal mining regulations before the accident and lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission after it happened. He was convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards and served one year in prison, and was released in May 2017.
There’s a behind the scenes look at this Hillbilly shoot out also at Vox by Dylan Scott. This is for the seat held by Joe Manchin who is the Democrat we count on when we need a senate majority and little else.
Blankenship is, in many ways, an only-in-West-Virginia story. He grew up in Mingo County and got his college degree from Marshall University. He rose through the ranks at the Massey coal company, helping build it into one of the largest mining outfits in the country. By 2010, he was making nearly $20 million a year.
But then on April 5, 2010, 29 miners died in an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia.
Blankenship stepped down soon after, but four years later, federal prosecutors indicted him on conspiring to willfully violate federal mining regulations before the accident and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission in its aftermath.
The investigation laid bare Blankenship’s cutthroat vision of capitalism. This was a businessman who broke unions, laughed off climate change, despised federal regulations, and described his industry in Darwinian imagery.
It’s an interesting read from there on out and I recommend it because this race will stay in the news for some time. I don’t even think I’ve been to West Virginia so all I can do is watch and wonder.
Meanwhile, black men are trying to figure out what it means to be Kanye. It’s the ongoing necessary discussion of what it means to be black in America. Again, I’m watching this all with an eye to being understanding and checking my own frames. I’ve also learned a lot by watching this new video by Donald Glover. This thread on Twitter is worth reading.
I've watched @donaldglover's new music video a few times now and the first time I watched it I had a familiar, primal discomfort that I couldn't place.
It wasn't until the third watch that I realized it was reminding me of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Even his accouterment felt beyond me—the studded jacket, the sparkling glove, the leather pants—raiment of the divine, untouchable by me, a mortal child who squinted to see past Saturday, who would not even see Motown 25 until it was past 30, who would not even own a copy of Thriller until I was a grown man, who no longer believed in miracles, and knew in my heart that if the black man’s God was not dead, he surely was dying.
And he had always been dying—dying to be white. That was what my mother said, that you could see the dying all over his face, the decaying, the thinning, that he was disappearing into something white, desiccating into something white, erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown, and we would forget his pharaoh’s nose, forget his vast eyes, his dazzling smile, and Michael Jackson was but the extreme of what felt in those post-disco years to be a trend. Because when I think of that time, I think of black men on album covers smiling back at me in Jheri curls and blue contacts and I think of black women who seemed, by some mystic edict, to all be the color of manila folders. Michael Jackson might have been dying to be white, but he was not dying alone. There were the rest us out there, born, as he was, in the muck of this country, born in The Bottom. We knew that we were tied to him, that his physical destruction was our physical destruction, because if the black God, who made the zombies dance, who brokered great wars, who transformed stone to light, if he could not be beautiful in his own eyes, then what hope did we have—mortals, children—of ever escaping what they had taught us, of ever escaping what they said about our mouths, about our hair and our skin, what hope did we ever have of escaping the muck? And he was destroyed. It happened right before us. God was destroyed, and we could not stop him, though we did love him, we could not stop him, because who can really stop a black god dying to be white?
Kanye is deconstructed thusily:
And he is a god, though one born of a different time and a different need. Jackson rose in the last days of enigma and wonder; West, in an accessible age, when every fuck is a tweet and every defecation a status update. And perhaps, in that way, West has done something more remarkable, more amazing than Jackson, because he is a man of no mystery, overexposed, who holds the world’s attention through simply the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work.
…
West is 40 years old, a product of the Crack era and Reaganomic Years, a man who remembers the Challenger crash and The Cosby Show before syndication. But he never fell into the bitterness of his peers. He could not be found chasing ghosts, barking at Soulja Boy, hectoring Lil Yachty, and otherwise yelling at clouds. To his credit, West seemed to remember rappers having to defend their music as music against the withering fire of their elders. And so while, today, you find some of these same artists, once targets, adopting the sanctimonious pose of the arthritic jazz-men whom they vanquished, you will not find Yeezy among them, because Yeezy never got old.
Maybe that was the problem.
Coates argues that West is dying for ‘white freedom’.
I see these guys–Prince for that matter too–as men in a country that is deeply troubled and yet oddly awed by black male sexuality and strength. I harken back to the days of Boney M when we were all allowed to demonstrate a bit of that obvious human need for sex and Boney M looked like Prince with a lower level of production value. But, the shock and awe of black male sexuality harkens more back to slavery. This is why Glover’s video has images that both remind us of Black Lives Matter and Django.
The Drumpf occupation of the Oval Office keeps sorting us up into tribes then pitting us against each other. It’s a long standing tradition in the white patriarchy to do that so that’s no surprise. What is a surprise is that it still works when so many of us are educated, aware of what’s going on in the world, and have choices.
So, since Der Hair Fury has suggested he might be holding a summit on Race Relations it seems appropriate to review the granddaddy of these kinds of efforts. ‘The 1968 Kerner Commission report harshly described a country increasingly polarized by race. Its findings inspired positive change, but also more polarization. ‘ This is from The Daily Beast and dated from last month. This is the tale of how The Fair Housing Act was passed and the role of a Republican in doing it in House Committee. It also reminds us how fragile even our laws can be as one Black Cabinet member enabled by a hell of a lot of Republicans is trying to water it down.
People movin’ out, people movin’ in. Why, because of the color of their skin. Run, run, run, but you sho’ can’t hide
These short-term victories—more effective policing, improved media coverage, and passage of the Fair Housing Act—were significant for the commission’s report, but its long-term legacy is less clear. Lindsay and Harris had fought for a summary that would grab attention and generate flashy headlines. Soon they began to worry that reporters were focusing only on the report’s most provocative language and ignoring its detailed descriptions of the problems facing America’s cities. Harris recalled that he knew the commission had a perception problem after talking to his father, a small farmer in southwestern Oklahoma who had worked hard his whole life and had little to show for it. Based on the media reports he had seen, his father interpreted the report as saying, “You should pay more taxes to help out the black people who are rioting in Detroit.” That did not make a lot of sense to his dad. “I’m already paying a lot in taxes and getting nothing for it,” he responded. “Why doesn’t someone pay attention to me? Is it because I’m not rioting?”
Lindsay was probably right in believing it necessary to include striking language in the summary about “two societies” and “white racism” to ensure that the report would garner the attention it deserved. But the downside to this strategy was that the summary distracted attention from the heart of the report—the thoughtful narrative about the cause of the riots and the detailed, statistical evidence to support the existence of persistent discrimination. Lindsay and Harris assumed that racism persisted because most middle-class whites were unaware that it existed, and they thought that if confronted with clear evidence that discrimination imposed undue hardship on African Americans, white suburbanites would embrace new social programs, accept higher taxes, and demand more aggressive efforts to integrate their communities. “I believe that white people in America are decent people,” Harris told the New York Times in February 1968, and that “if they can be shown the terrible conditions in which other Americans live and how this threatens our society, they will join together to try to solve these problems.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday signed into law the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation, surrounded by toddler-toting supporters.
As Reynolds inked the bill, backers’ cheers nearly drowned out the echoing chorus of “My body, my choice” shouted by protesters just outside the door.
“I believe that all innocent life is precious and sacred,” Reynolds said from her formal office before signing a bill that will outlaw nearly all abortions in the state. “And as governor, I have pledged to do everything in my power to protect it. And that’s what I’m doing today.”
Senate File 359 will take effect July 1, though Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa said they plan to quickly challenge the law.
Under the legislation, physicians will be barred from performing most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Experts said that heartbeat can be heard about six weeks into a pregnancy — often before a woman realizes she’s pregnant.
What matter of insanity causes a white woman to do this?
Miller’s essay, The White Women and the Language of Bees, was published last week in Pree, a new magazine highlighting writers from the Caribbean. Asking “how many years and decades must pass before we can belong to a place and to its words? How much time before we can write it?”, the essay saw the Forward prize-winning author discuss his interactions with four white women writers from the region, evaluating their books, and the way they have interacted with the local literary community.
“Was she really afraid? Was she nervous about people like me reading her book and throwing words like ‘appropriation’ about? Am I a part of her anxiety?” he wrote of one. In another scene, he imagines one of the women telling another: “You can’t be writing this place and putting the wrong words in people’s mouths. This rock is not made of granite or limestone, but with words. You must be given the right words. And these, my dear sister, are things you have yet to learn.”
The essay drew both praise and condemnation from writers. Rhoda Bharath called it “a necessary addition to the global cultural conversations around identity, appropriation and privilege”, while Veerle Poupeye wrote, in an open letter to Miller, that “parts of the essay are indeed breathtaking, because of the writing and because of the sublime insights you offer”, but took issue with Miller’s publication of private conversations, his focus on white women and not white men, and his representation of the women in the essay.
Judy Raymond said: “Almost everything that has happened since Kei’s essay has been based on emotion. It’s clear we need to have urgent conversations about race, racism, gender and privilege. Instead, careers and friendships are being broken and those conversations are being replaced by the verbal equivalent of hurricanes.”
One of President Donald Trump’s most trusted black advisers wants the president to hold a summit on race relations at the White House with rapper Kanye West.
Darrell Scott, a pastor from Cleveland, is scheduled to meet with the president on Thursday to discuss his proposal for the summit, which would also include other prominent artists and athletes, Politico reported.
Scott said the summit would be “totally unscripted” and no topic would be “off the table.” He’s reportedly pitching the summit alongside Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and an aide in the White House Office of Public Liaison.
Some one drop a mic please.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m still recovering from whatever flu virus hit me last weekend. I do have my voice back and I’m coughing a bit less so I’m beginning to catch up with reading this and that. I stayed in bed with hot tea and a marathon of “Drunk History” while trying to figure out if the noise I was hearing last night was gunfire or fireworks. I have no idea what the mix of one to the other was. That’s one of those things that keeps me indoors on NY’s Eve because I really don’t want to be the one out there gathering the data. Most folks try not to think about about it.
One of the things that always amazes me is how vulnerable people are to wishful thinking and things easily demonstrated to be complete bullshit. I suppose I suffer the hubris of the scholar on this account. I didn’t have access to the internet in my home until 1980 but you generally could find me in whichever library housed the government documents drop. Yes, the University of Nebraska libraries had huge basements dedicated to the stuff at one time and I was a basement dweller. Now it’s all on spreadsheets on my hard drive. It really doesn’t take much to figure out what is what. However, everything experiences variation and intellect and curiosity are no different.
I guess the same thing that makes folks vulnerable to religion also makes them vulnerable to political myth. My first experience with all the ploy to keep people well-behaved and hopeful was as a child when I learned my parents were deliberately lying to me about Santa Claus for my sister’s sake. I later studied 3rd and 4th century Roman history and lost religion. It’s basically the same MO but with much better data. But the Santa episode really sunk in. I went to the basement, screamed at myself for being so stupid then wondered what else they’d been lying to me about. Well, it turned out that it was about a lot of things that I could easily find out about in my handy dandy local library’s reference section. I’ve spent my professional and personal life gleaning through data looking for truths. I hate being taken in.
We’ve all been stumped about why Donald Trump could gain ground in any national level political race. He says things that are blatantly hateful and false, yet he gains ground. Polls showing his demographics illustrate his base. It’s basically the ugly underbelly of the US that shows up in our history quite frequently. These folks love being taken in.
Donald Trump holds a dominant position in national polls in the Republican race in no small part because he is extremely strong among people on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition.
He is strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated and less likely to turn out to vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
Mr. Trump’s huge advantage among these groups poses a challenge for his campaign, because it may not have the turnout operation necessary to mobilize irregular voters
The Civis estimates are based on interviews with more than 11,000 Republican-leaning respondents since August. The large sample, combined with statistical modeling techniques, presents the most detailed examination yet of the contours of Mr. Trump’s unusual coalition.
We’ve seen this set of nutcases before. It appears to be the return of the Reagan coalition. This turns my mind back to the Santa Claus story, and for that matter, any particular dead religious figure you can conjure up that people have turned into something not quite like the original narrative. Ronald Reagan was an affable fool. Any economist that has studied the time period and his policies will tell you a completely different, data-based narrative than most of the people taken in by him. BB sent me this link a few days ago. I’ve only been able to really digest it today.
Any of us that have intensely studied some aspect of his regime–in my case the economic data–know that the myth is no where close to the truth. These narratives always seem to serve the current group of rich, powerful, assholes. It doesn’t matter if you’re told to submit yourself to your husband or master or render unto Rome, it’s pretty much the same thing. These so-called populist heroes lead sheep to slaughter.
Ronald Reagan was not only intellectually ungifted, he was incurious and ignorant about the details of the day. It’s amazing to me that as historians go back and sift through their form of data on the ground, so little of it manages to take down the public id. The link to Salon takes you to an excerpt from “The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton” by WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG whose thesis on Reagan is summed up thusily: “No one ever entered the White House so grossily ill-informed”. This says a lot given he was followed relatively shortly by Dubya Bush who didn’t even appear to have a command of his primary language let alone nuanced policy. Remember, Dubya’s the guy that declared war on a lot of Muslim-majority countries without a real grasp of the difference between Sunni and Shia let alone the minority ones.
No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed. To be sure, his detractors sometimes exaggerated his ignorance. The publication of his radio addresses of the 1950s revealed a considerable command of facts, though in a narrow range. But nothing suggested profundity. “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”
In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”
I actually was convinced that Reagan was so obviously ignorant and wrong about so many things that you could run any one against him and he’d never get a second term. I was obviously young and not jaded enough to grasp the demographic that supported him because they believed what they wanted to believe because he told them so in such a “nice” way. Now, this same group of yahoos is angry and they believe what Donald Trump tells them because they believe what they want to believe because he tells them in such an “angry” way. ‘Morning in America’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Make America Great Again’ doesn’t it? All of this is basically code for ‘Save White Privilege’ even if I don’t really benefit that much from it. As long you as you can make me feel superior to (fill in the blank), I’ll wishfully hope and then vote for you.
I try to tell myself that there’s no way that Donald Trump could ever be elected but then I would not be learning from my obviously wrong hypothesis that Ronald Reagan could ever get a second term. Reagan raised taxes. He ran up the deficit hugely. There’s the Reagan “recession” and there was Iran Contra which all of these folks conveniently never heard about or forgot when they voted for the affable buffoon. The same demographic could care less about Trump’s lies and the tremendous internet base of fact checking.
“This is the first time we have named someone the ‘King of Whoppers,'” Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org said.
Donald Trump earned that crown with the biggest whopper of 2015:
“I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he said in a Birmingham, Alabama, rally in November 21.
The fact checkers found evidence of just a few people celebrating. But that wasn’t the only tall Trump tale of the year.
“He’s certainly keeping us busy… It is the worst that we have seen in the 12 years we have been doing this,” Kiely said.
“You know, the president’s thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away,” Trump said at a South Carolina rally on October 19.
Then in New Hampshire, on September 30: “You know, it started off with 10,000. The other day I heard 200,000. We are going to take in 200,000 Syrians or wherever they come from,” Trump said.
“It’s just way over what the actual number is,” Kiely explains.
“It appears that Donald Trump, a pathological liar, simply cannot control himself. He lies, lies and lies again. Today, he repeated his lie that I want to raise taxes to 90 percent. Totally untrue. And PolitiFact gave Trump’s same statement last October a ‘Pants-on-Fire’ rating.
Bush talked to CNN on Wednesday and reinforced his point from the debate that Trump is “not a serious candidate.”
“I got to post up against Donald Trump,” Bush said. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate.”
He added, “And I don’t know why others don’t feel compelled to point that out, but I did. And I think I got a chance to express my views and compare them to someone who talks a big game but really hasn’t thought it through.”
Didn’t we say all this about a gawky rogue presidential candidate named Barack Obama? Sure. But Obama had the advantage of not looking and sounding like a complete fucking idiot. Obama was on the Harvard Law Review, not the Santa Fe Community College football team. Then again, that’s not really fair to community collegians and football players: Plenty of each are smart enough to run the country. It just so happens that Rubio isn’t one of them.
For proof, simply look to Rubio’s campaign message, a bizarre simulacrum of “hope and change” focus-grouped by Red Stripe-swilling blue blazers who are slightly scared of hope and change because they’ve witnessed its power but never fully understood its appeal, like those crouched simians sizing up the galactic monolith in 2001.
This scares me. It should scare you.
I will also admit that I didn’t think Obama was going to be as good of a President as he has turned out to be. I really thought he’d continue to let the Republicans play him like a violin, but he learned, and learned well. His last few years defy the lame duck theory.
So, I’m doing a mea culpa on the two failed hypotheses today just because I do not want to be lulled into a third one. We clearly have one great candidate that is experienced, flawed, and capable. Then, we have a set of figures that look religiously mythical, are supported by people who have a lot to gain from populist ignorance, and appear to be impossibly unqualified for making national policy on all levels. They may have one area upon which they are knowledgeable but most have absolutely nothing but being able to say blatantly wrong things because they have no clue how wrong they actually are.
Work in the right campaigns and vote in 2016. Don’t make me write another mea culpa in 2017. Please.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
And, have a great NEW YEAR!!! I love you all!!!
Thirty years ago from 1985 and deep from Reagan d0o d0o land.
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It sounds like there won’t be any surprises in the latest “inspirational” speech by the King President. All the newspapers already know what he’s going to say. The New York Times says Obama is “opting for a faster pullout,” but they say he’ll only withdraw 10,000 troops this year.
President Obama plans to announce Wednesday evening that he will order the withdrawal of 10,000 American troops from Afghanistan this year, and another 20,000 troops, the remainder of the 2009 “surge,” by the end of next summer, according to administration officials and diplomats briefed on the decision. These troop reductions are both deeper and faster than the recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s military commanders, and they reflect mounting political and economic pressures at home, as the president faces relentless budget pressures and an increasingly restive Congress and American public.
The president is scheduled to speak about the Afghanistan war from the White House at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
Mr. Obama’s decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has long argued for curtailing the American military engagement in Afghanistan. But it is a setback for his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped write the Army’s field book on counterinsurgency policy, and who is returning to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to Josh Gerstein at Politico, Obama’s speech will address multiple audiences who are in disagreement about what to do about the war in Afghanistan.
His address comes at a time when public skepticism about the war is building. A Pew Research Center poll out Tuesday showed a record high 56 percent of Americans want the troops out as soon as possible, up from 40 percent a year ago.
Keeping the American people on board is a major challenge for Obama. But he’ll also be speaking to a number of smaller audiences in the U.S. who have a stake in the outcome of the mission — and some of them are starkly at odds about the best path forward.
The Republican Party is growing more restive about the war, liberals are hoping for a more rapid pull-out, and the military brass worries that politics might mess up a fight they think they’re winning.
Gerstein says that many military officers think they are winning and that this pullout may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so to speak. On the other hand, higher ups in the Pentagon are relieved that he isn’t pulling out even faster.
Some Republicans are beginning to turn against the war, but others like John McCain and Lindsey Graham are still gung ho. He also has to consider Republican presidential candidates, some of whom–Romney, Huntsman, Paul–are critical of the continuing involvement in the Middle East.
Gerstein claims that Obama is also considering the views of Democrats, which I strongly doubt. Gerstein mentions Carl Levin:
Among Democratic supporters of Obama’s overall policy in Afghanistan, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman has been one of the most explicit about what he wants to see: at least 15,000 troops out by the end of this year. Doing less “wouldn’t be the ‘significant’ cut Obama pledged in April and would send a weaker message to the Afghan people and the wrong message to the American people,” Levin said Tuesday.
Lastly, Gerstein claims Obama must address “the professional left.” Excuse me while I laugh hysterically. Obama does not give a sh%t about the progs, because he knows perfectly well they’ll vote for him no matter what he does.
So…. what do you think? Please let us know your reactions to the speech and the policies Obama puts forward. If you can’t stand to watch, listen on the radio. That’s what I do. Or just join in and get the highlights from those who are watching/listening.
This morning President Obama gave an interview to Ann Curry of NBC’s The Today Show. It was a pretty strange interview for someone planning to run for a second term as President. Obama told Curry that it doesn’t make much difference to him whether he wins the 2012 election or not.
Though the president himself, his staff, and his supporters around the country are busy devoting everything they’ve got to his 2012 re-election campaign, Obama revealed Monday that his family isn’t necessarily as “invested.”
[….]
And the president revealed that even he sometimes feels like giving up.
“I’m sure there are days where I say that one term is enough,” the president said, but he added that what keeps him going is the unfinished work regarding energy, education, and other issues.
Then why should all the bots go out and support him this time? Can we get a candidate who actually cares about the country?
…if the first lady thought it was time for him to go, he’d listen.
“I think Michelle – if she didn’t think that what we were doing was worthwhile in moving the country forward, I think she’d be the first to say, ‘Why don’t you do something else that’s a little less stressful?’”
Obama also discussed the public perception that he’s a cold fish who never gets worked up about anything. First he claims that “ordinary folks” don’t really think that.
“Ordinary folks understand I spend all my time thinking about this stuff because I’m talking to these folks every single day,” he said….”When I see them at meetings, and they start crying, the notion, somehow, that I’m calm about that, is nonsense. But what is true is that as president, my job is to make sure that I am finding every good idea that we can to move the country forward.”
Well then what does he do when he sees “them” and “they start crying?” Frankly, he’s a sociopath with almost no ability to empathize with other people. He doesn’t even understand what these people are feeling because he doesn’t experience strong emotions other than narcissistic rage and envy. JMHO.
Obama also pretended talked about jobs without really saying much of anything.
Obama says the real challenge is to develop new industries to spur job growth.
“The challenge, though, is it only takes 100 workers to make what it used to take 1,000 workers to make in terms of the amount of steel,” he said. “So that’s why we’re going to have to look at new industries and encourage entrepreneurs to invest in these new industries and make sure that our workers have the skills to train them.
“For us to employ the same numbers of workers as we need to, to get the unemployment rate down, we’ve got to look at new sectors, new markets. We’ve got to do more exporting. So one of my big areas of focus has been on increasing exports.”
Whatever….he doesn’t really care about jobs or “ordinary folks,” and it shows.
Why did Obama give this interview? What’s the point? Was it a shoutout to Republicans that he’s ready to turn the government over to them?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Nothing has made me more sharply aware of my white womaness than this last damned presidential race. Black women were not fooled and they worked hard to get Clinton elected down here in Louisiana. Many white woman simply will not Surrender the Ivory Pedestal. Figuring this out and correcting it is something only white women can do with each other. Making sure that we do not disenfranchise the women of color around us is our challenge.
Blankenship is a doozy of a candidate. Even KKKremlin Caligula fears a repeat of Alabama’s Roy Moore. 
There’s a behind the scenes look at this 
Kanye is deconstructed thusily:
Today, I wonder how many white women are “decent people”. Surely, the majority of us are but what is going on with the group that’s larger than it really should be? Let’s take this one for example that once again proves that really, I would never vote for just any or this particular vagina bearer. 
What matter of insanity causes a white woman to do this?
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